John Kiriakou, now in the private sector, served as a CIA counter-terrorism official from 1998 to 2004. Today, he writes in Los Angeles Times Opinion about how he thinks Iran is making major diplomatic inroads into Latin America, right under Washington's nose. It's amazing, really. Iran, after all, is regarded by most of the world as an outlaw country. Sanctions are in place on much of its military-industrial complex, and international loan guarantees are virtually impossible to come by. The Iranian economy is in tatters. Even while $100-plus oil was enriching most producers in the region, Iran's low-tech, outdated industry was barely profiting. In fact, 6% of the country's gasoline is imported.
Nevertheless, over the last year, Iran has worked diligently to expand relations with a host of Latin American countries, most of which have populist leaders who harbor a strong distrust of the United States and are looking for a powerful friend to help them rebuff Washington's influence.
Read the rest of "Iran's Latin America push" here.
— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Chris Kraul and Patrick J. Mcdonnell report from São Paulo on the growing popularity of Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. "Buoyed by a robust economy and his ability to work with leaders across the ideological spectrum, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has emerged as the chief power broker and mediator in South America.
"Lula's rise has paralleled the decline of U.S. influence in its 'backyard,' analysts say, a result in part of Washington's plummeting global prestige and the Bush administration's unremitting focus on the Middle East.
"A moderate with an unassailable leftist background, Lula has become the point man for healing regional crises such as the current turmoil in Bolivia and the recent escalation of tensions among Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador."
Click here for more about Brazil.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, second from the right, with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa at the meeting in which they talked about regional integration in Manaus, Brazil. Credit: Antonio Lacerda / European Pressphoto Agency
As his popularity has surged and his nation's booming economy has lifted thousands from poverty, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has largely refrained from the angry criticism of the United States that can be heard nearly any day from other South American leaders.
Not this time, reports Joshua Partlow for the Washington Post.
Last week, Lula told the U.N. General Assembly that the "boundless greed" of a few should not be shouldered by all, and on Monday, he said emerging economies had done their best to have "good fiscal policy" and "can't be turned into victims of the casino erected by the American economy."
"This crisis belongs to the American bankers, to the European bankers. It doesn't belong to the Brazilian bankers," Lula said Monday. "It's not fair for Latin American, African and Asian countries to pay for the irresponsibility of sectors of the American financial system."
Earlier this week, Chris Kraul reported from Ecuador on why Latin America should worry about the economic crisis in the United States.
Read the rest of the report from the Washington Post here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
After being lectured for 20 years about the superiority of the free market, officials in Latin America see no small irony in the effort to bail out the U.S. banking system, writes Chris Kraul from Ecuador.
Latin America has several reasons to worry about the U.S. economic meltdown. Ecuador, for instance, fears the possible loss of duty-free export markets for its coffee, fish and flowers.
People here are also worried the crisis will cut into the $2 billion in annual remittances sent home by Ecuadoreans living in the U.S., and wonder whether the nation's use of the dollar as the national currency, a move made in 2000 to curb inflation, still makes sense.
But there is an undercurrent of schadenfreude when it comes to America's pain. Commentator Boaventura de Sousa Santos scolded the United States for its "ironhanded evangelizing" that free markets, privatization and deregulation were innately more virtuous than "corrupt and efficient" state-run economies.
"Millions were thrown into unemployment, lost their land and labor rights and had to emigrate," the Portuguese-born Santos wrote in an article widely distributed over the Internet.
Read more about how the United States woes are also Latin America's problems.
Click here for more on business.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Stock traders negotiate at the Mercantile & Futures Exchange in Sao Paulo, Brazil, last week. Credit: Mauricio Lima / AFP / Getty Images
Salvador Gomez Gochez was 25 when he first came to Los Angeles with $3 in his pocket and painful memories of his Salvadoran homeland torn apart by repression and war, reports Teresa Watanabe.
Working his way up from a parking lot attendant to a manager, he learned English, bought a home, volunteered for a Salvadoran community organization and became a U.S. citizen, grateful to the country he says saved his life.
But Gomez Gochez, now 54, also retained his Salvadoran citizenship. Now, as a dual citizen, he has made the dramatic decision to return to his impoverished hometown in El Salvador and run for mayor after nearly three decades away. His hope: to revive his town's agricultural base with his U.S. contacts and empower the villagers with U.S. practices of participatory democracy.
As international business, travel and communications explode, a growing number of nations are allowing dual citizenship, and more immigrants are claiming it. Some, like Gomez Gochez, aim to use their bilingual and bicultural experiences to infuse their homelands with U.S. values and strengthen bonds between both countries.
But the trend is also stirring some unease.
Read more about Americans with dual citizenship here.
Image: Mario Fuentes poses at outside of Trinity Episcopal Church that hosts his L.A.-based community organization. Fuentes, an immigrant from El Salvador, is a middle-class homeowner, fluent English speaker and labor and community organizer. Credit: Los Angeles Times
In the film "Paraíso Travel,” a young immigrant named Marlon finds himself lost and broke shortly after arriving in New York and being separated from his girlfriend, the cunning and sexy Reina, played by Angélica Blandón. He meets an older man, a fixer for new arrivals, who helps him find shelter and asks the naive illegal what else he might need, writes Agustin Gurza.
"How do I get rid of this fear?" asks Marlon, somewhat overplayed by Aldemar Correa.
Of course, the old man can't help him with the dread that haunts strangers in a strange land, except to say that in time it goes away. That small, intimate moment in this occasionally overwrought drama offers a glimpse into the emotional and mental toll of the immigrant experience, which is often seen through ideological eyes.
"Paraíso," the year's biggest box office hit in Colombia, will have its West Coast premiere during the 12th annual Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, which begins Friday. It's one of 132 films that will screen at the festival, co-founded by Edward James Olmos, Marlene Dermer and the late George Hernández to spotlight Latino films. Ironically, the festival has suffered from the very success it has sought as top Latino filmmakers now find themselves courted by other festivals. Still, many consider the festival (which counts The Times as a sponsor) as a special opportunity to show their work in the U.S.
Read more about the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival here.
For more on film on La Plaza, click here.
Image: The film, featuring Aldemar Correa and Angélica Blandón, middle, is one of seven from Colombia that is screening at the festival. Camilo George Jimeno / Grand Illusions Entertainment
Rocky Delgadillo, the Los Angeles city attorney, oversees the enforcement of 57 gang injunctions, including ones against the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. In Opinion today, he talks about how combating Los Angeles gangs is not a local challenge, but an international one. "The two fastest-growing and most powerful gangs in the world are homegrown products of Los Angeles. The Mara Salvatrucha gang, or MS-13, and the 18th Street gang, known in Central America as Mara 18, sprang up in Pico-Union and the densely populated neighborhoods around MacArthur Park. But unlike many local street gangs, these two were entrepreneurial: They recruited Central American immigrants across the city and then expanded farther -- throughout Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Conservative estimates put MS-13's ranks at 20,000 and 18th Street's at 30,000 worldwide.
"Stopping street gangs is no longer a local matter -- a point driven home to me during a symposium in El Salvador. During the conference, two points of consensus emerged. First, MS-13 and 18th Street have become an international concern -- indeed, even Interpol is now involved in the fight. Second, past strategies to handle these gangs have failed."
Read the full Opinion piece here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain go head to head in this BBC piece on their policy differences over Latin America this morning.
But other than a difference in tone and Obama's opposition to free trade, there's not much difference between their approaches to the region, writes Lourdes Heredia.
Both McCain and Obama support United States interventions in the fight against drug trafficking throughout Latin America, with both candidates behind Plan Colombia and the recently approved Merida Initiative.
Obama -- who apparently has never set foot in Latin America -- has a higher profile here because he is perceived as representing a fresh start for a region in which the Bush administration is unpopular.
Read the rest of the BBC's assessment of the rivals here...
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
 Spurred by foreign investment and a real estate boom, Panama City is becoming the Sao Paulo of Central America, reports The Times' Chris Kraul in this story.
"Home buyers and investors are flocking here from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Europe and the United States," Kraul writes.
"Its cosmopolitan ambience has a renegade element: Panama has long been and still is a staging ground for illegal arms going south to Colombian armed groups and for drugs traveling north to U.S. consumers."
" ... Panama's leaders insist their country is on a trajectory toward First World status and respectability."
"But the rapid growth has exposed the country's infrastructure as woefully inadequate for its good fortune. Monumental traffic snarls, shortages of housing, electricity and water shortfalls and ugly land-use spats are the flip side of the bonanza."
-- Reed Johnson in Mexico City
Photo: Modern Panama City rises across the bay from Casco Antiguo, the historic quarter. A building boom is transforming the capital's skyline. Credit: Los Angeles Times
House lawmakers voted 311-106 on Tuesday to authorize the Merida Initiative, a $1.6 billion plan to help fight drug cartels in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
“Either we can go after these cartels in Ensenada, or we can fight them in Escondido,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Carlsbad), who voted for the plan. “I’d prefer that we move now and take care of this problem south of the border. The drug wars in Mexico and in other regions have grown horrendously violent, and their destructive ways must be quashed.”
Bilbray was one of several U.S. lawmakers who went to Monterrey, Mexico, over the weekend to discuss the initiative with Mexican officials. Mexico has objected to human rights conditions that Congress attached to the aid. The State Department has identified Mexico as a major supplier of marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. Escalating violence between rival Mexican drug cartels has fueled increasing violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
-- Nicole Gaouette in Washington
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Chris Kraul
Buenos Aires:
Patrick McDonnell
Caribbean:
Carol Williams
Mexico City:
Hector Tobar
Deborah Bonello
Marla Dickerson
Ken Ellingwood
Reed Johnson
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette